A man kissed a girl. The next day he went on a diet.

The above is an example of parataxis. Parataxis is a grammatical technique that places one naked fact next to another. The author doesn't waste words explaining the cause and effect between the two events. (Parataxis means there are no conjunctions like "because" or "therefore"; there's just a gap.) So, the reader sits with silence. She has to figure out what the author means: What logic links the first image to the second?

A reader can usually figure it out. After all, readers have psychological skills. Everyone knows a bit about how motivation works. A guy kisses a girl. (So of course he worries about how attractive he is.) And so, he goes on a diet.

Parataxis is lovely, I think, because it shows that there's trust between people speaking to each other. A speaker lays out facts without an overly directive "why." The listener searches through her life experiences--and she just gets it. One person ships out a sign; another person reads it; and they meet at the same spot without naming it.

I can't overstate my love of In Treatment, the HBO series which just started its second season last night. The show is masterful in terms of silence--of implied ideas, of explanations left out of the text. It's so logical in its silence that it can make anyone feel like an expert psychologist.

The series features a therapist, Paul. Each episode shows us one therapy session he has with a patient. From session to session, we gradually come to understand the motivations powering Paul and the people he treats.

HBO, itself, stages a meaningful dance-move of parataxis insofar as it screens two episodes back-to-back each time it airs the show. In one episode, we see Paul with one patient. Then we get a little HBO music and a short interlude (I love this network which has no commercials and makes the timing between episodes an art). The next episode presents Paul with his next patient.

It goes without saying that one therapy session influences how Paul acts in the one that follows. And there's no explicit explanation for how and why. In other words, to understand the show, we need to be Paul's thoughtful therapist. We have to guess at his motivations--or theorize about how some ego blow or compliment in one session shapes what he says to his next patient.

Last night was a great example of HBO parataxis. The first episode featured Paul in a lawyer's office (that was a break from the norm; usually each episode happens in his own therapy office). It turns out that Paul's being sued by the father of one of his former patients.

His former patient was a fighter pilot who--through a few sessions with Paul--had begun to lower his defenses and name his vulnerabilities. But the pilot, who was only successful in the Navy because of his strength, didn't enjoy feeling vulnerable. So he cut it off with Paul and returned to flying planes. Soon after, he crashed. In last night's episode, the patient's dad insisted that Paul was responsible for the patient's emergent weaknesses. Paul shouldn't have tried to unlace this man's most useful defenses...or at least he shouldn't have let him fly again after a debilitating self-exploration. Paul, as therapist, had no sense of what he destroyed.

Then the episode ends. We hear some music and slip into the next episode. Here, Paul's settling into his chair to greet a new patient. She's in her 20s, a highly independent student at Pratt; and she tells him, in her flip, I-have-conquered-demons tone, that she has cancer. She's been considering taking the route of homeopathic care, she says. Paul listens like a dutifully open-minded shrink, but then moves forward in his seat and insists she's running away from life. You can't treat cancer with acupuncture, he says: She must seek the help of Western medicine.

So, from one episode to the next, we've essentially read a narrative about Paul. In one episode, he was blamed for being irresponsible. In the next episode, he compensates. A shrink usually doesn't give such ardent advice to a patient. But after his confidence has been dealt a blow, he needs to compensate: Don't die, he begs the twentysomething girl from Pratt.

I'm thinking that this is how all great narrative works--someone receives a blow, there's silence, and then there's parataxis. The second move reveals the secrets about how the first blow felt to the character in action.

No one needs to fully, linguistically explain human pain and rebound: We spot it when we see it.

This is the law behind Shakespearean tragedy, too: In Shakespeare's plays, someone has a grand, heroic drive. He runs with it ardently, and that character trait, or drive, propels him to success. And then, as quickly, and with as little explanation, he suffers some awful fate. Without wordy explanation from Shakespeare, we simply spot this paradox as the knot of human life. The same characteristics that drive a guy to greatness bring him down.

Good narrative is a psychologically-minded connect-the-dots--that game we played as kids. No one tells anyone which dot to connect to which, but our sense of life as we've known it so far helps us intuit where a dot directs us. At the end, after making all the connections, we've got a recognizable character in front of us.

Parataxis is the grammar of psychologists: You never get a full explanation, but you can intuit the human motivation at hand.

The latest entry for corporate buzzword bingo is the term “open innovation”. So let’s ask the question… what the heck is open innovation, anyway? Also, is open innovation really an obviously good thing, like having an open heart, or maybe a more complicated thing, like asking your spouse for an open marriage?

Open innovation is a powerful term. Apparently, combining two buzzwords, sort of like cold fusion, produces more buzz than if you just used the terms separately. Its opposite – closed innovation – evokes images of silos, cowardly decision making, and not leveraging the power of open networks. How could anyone question the wisdom of opening up innovation?

But you have to admit, the intellectual property system has been pretty useful to companies for the last couple of hundred years… is it really time to retire the patent process and live the open source dream? Let's start by looking at a couple of examples...

One early example of open innovation is Procter & Gamble’s innovation platform C+D (ie, Connect and Develop), which allows customers and partners to co-create products at P&G. Their position is that not all the smart people work for P&G, so the quickest way to grow was to leverage outside talent and move from knowledge generation to knowledge brokering. Currently, they’ve increased their share of external innovation from 10% in 2000 to 35% today.

Another example is DVD rental powerhouse, Netflix, which recently invited outsiders to help them improve an important algorithm for their movie recommendation system. The kicker was offering a $1 million prize to whoever improves the accuracy of their current film recommendation system at least 10%, in a publicity move reminiscent of the Clay Institute’s  million dollar prize for solving unsolved math problems like the Poincaré Conjecture and the Riemann Hypothesis.

But do these models really work, or are they possibly aiding and abetting your competitors to beat you to your own best ideas? The key to understanding open innovation is to dig beneath the buzzwords to truly understand the meaning of openness and to deconstruct the structure of the collaborative process.

A terrific example of understanding openness can come by studying the goal of digitizing medical records, which is part of the Obama economic stimulus package.  At first, something like digitizing musty old boxes of yellowing health records doesn’t sound like a particularly exciting or innovative idea. But it’s exactly what’s needed to build out the “last mile” of an information highway for medicine.

Therefore, open health isn’t at all about making private health records more open, and hence less private. It’s about creating standards that allow medical systems used by doctors, hospitals, patients, and others to easily "talk" with one another. It’s about enabling the system to proactively search for drug interactions that cause hard to detect complications. It’s about eliminating the bureaucratic paperwork via automated claim submission. Finally, it’s about creating a more intelligent and secure system for health records.

Therefore, openness in innovation isn’t about opening the kimono to potential competitors or about irrevocably committing to the open source model… it’s really about three enabling factors that can transform the collaborative process at your company, especially around innovation. First, it’s about increasing the diffusion of innovation by making both internal and external corporate boundaries more porous. Second, it’s about developing more refined non-binary trust models that let you digitize the paperwork of innovation. And third, it’s about creating open standards for automating the innovation process just like Obama hopes to do with health records.

The diffusivity of innovation isn’t measured only in terms of letting external innovation in, but also in allowing innovation to move from the top down, from peer to peer, from the bottom up, and from the inside out. We call this 360˚ innovation, and if ideas aren’t flowing smoothly in any of these directions, your collaboration systems need an oil change.  Finally, the flow of IP from within the organization to outside should always be subject to great vigilance and strategic forethought.

Non-binary trust models really have to do with simplifying the management of intellectual property, in order to build a win-win culture where everyone benefits in equal measure – management, employees, partners, customers and shareholders. The key to digitizing innovation, is actually to design an electronic IP policy server and the key to enabling openness, is to deploy an enterprise social extranet. This is actually the most compelling part of the open innovation promise – to fundamentally change the nature of social networks to allow you to more reliably locate partners you can trust and who won’t let you down.

Open standards for automating the innovation process don’t mean anything unless you actually have one. A formal and automated process, that is. For example, has your company bought one of those fancy idea catching applications? If so, can you get your data back out of it? Was it off the shelf or custom fitted to your culture? Here’s a tough one – can it enable an enterprise social extranet that hot deploys new innovation applications via a Web 2.0 infrastructure? And are these capabilities even on your roadmap?

Open innovation holds great promise for re-invigorating the enterprise, but it requires great vision in its design, deployment and management. This is one of the areas I think about a lot these days, so please feel free to contact me if you’d like to create a dialogue around this fascinating arena!